In From The Cold

Some coppers carry a case for years. Regan carries Eddie Jackson. Jackson was a Sweeney officer shot and left permanently disabled during a robbery years back, and one of the gang, Billy Medhurst, vanished to Spain while the dust settled. Regan has blamed himself for Jackson ever since. So when he spots Medhurst back in London on a routine job, something old and hot stirs in him, and he decides this time the man goes down.

Haskins, the departmental voice of caution, tells him to keep his feelings out of it. Medhurst has a sharp lawyer, Ashby-Jones, and a case that smells of personal vendetta is exactly the sort a good brief takes apart in front of a jury. Regan listens, mostly. Then a meat lorry is knocked over and the evidence piles up in Medhurst's direction, which is awkward given the man was supposed to be retired to Spain, or dead, depending which story you believed.

The episode's real fight is between the copper's guilt and the lawyer's restraint. It holds up because both men are right: Medhurst is a villain who deserves putting away, and Regan's reasons for being the one to do it are not entirely professional. He knows it, and so do we.

Terry Green directs, and the script is by Tony Hoare and Ian Kennedy Martin. Anthony Heaton gives Medhurst a plausible, middle-aged menace, Garfield Morgan's Haskins smokes and frowns his way through the file, and Lewis Fiander brings a thin smile to Ashby-Jones. Martin Fisk's Jackson is the ghost at the feast, glimpsed and gone. Maureen Sweeney, John Alkin, Johnny Shannon and James Beckett fill out the rest, with Thaw and Waterman running the heart of it.

Regan gets his man. But the show is honest enough not to pretend the conviction fixes Jackson. The title may nod at the spy trade; the cold this man is coming in from is his own making.